A decade ago, the world was braced for the Y2K bug and everyone was prognosticating about the 21st century. Ten years into the new millennium, we look back at those predictions and decide which still seem likely - or not.

RightGlobal warming skeptics will continue to argue with scientists over climate change. Yup, that one's true, and the sides have become increasingly polarized. The article mentions a wide variety of scientists who approach climate change with varying degrees of acceptance. Since then, the vast majority of scientists accept human-influenced global climate change as fact, and dissenters are increasingly laypeople.

Electronic Media magazine predicted that local news would come to dominate the news cycle, due to the ease of producing digital content. Instead, local newspapers and channels are now mostly just grabbing content off the wires.

The Atlanta Journal and Constitution posited that by 2035, the population boom would have tailed off, but people would have an increasing desire for pets. That's still 25 years away, but we're not seeing it yet.

Some news-sources decided just to run mammoth lists, parts of which are right, part wrong. Here's a few of them, with our scores (in parens).

New York Times' 21 Brands To Watch in the 21st CenturyAmazon.com
America Online (dead in the water)Banana Republic (really?)Dell
Dryel (who?)ESPN (includes ESPN2, ESPN Magazine, ESPN Zone)
eBay (not doing so well these days)Excite@Home (again, really?)Fidelity Investments
Tommy Hilfiger
Krispy Kreme (points for delicious)Lucent Technologies (now owned by Alcatal, had to cut back on paying retirement funds, and has a massively reduced workforce)Mountain Dew (or mtn dew, as it's now known)Nickelodeon (includes Nick at Nite)
Nintendo (they had some rough years there, but are doing damned well right now)Nokia (really, really struggling at present)Priceline.com (well, they've got the Shat working for them, so there's that)SBC Communications (now part of AT&T)Starbucks (definitely got that one right)VanguardYahoo (almost, but not quite, dead)

No Google or Apple? Twitter, Facebook and YouTube hadn't yet hit the scene.

Discover magazine's list of things you'll need to know by 2020.You will need to know stuff you can hardly guess today (Fair enough)You will need to know how to talk to your house (Not yet an issue for most people)You will have to learn to drive a more automated car (Slowly filtering down to many new cars, like the BMW park assist)You'll identify yourself, gain access to homes and businesses, and board aircraft after a laser has measured the shape of your irises (Not happening yet, we still rely heavily on ID cards of one sort or another.)You'll need to know how to clean up that electronic trail day in and day out (Yes, yes, yes!)You'll need to know enough to make more complicated medical choices (To a certain extent this is becoming true, but not drastically more than previous years.)You'll need to access your betrothed's genetic map (Genetic testing is already available, and encouraged among some populations. )We will have to face the fact that technology favors some and eclipses others (We're starting to see this already, despite efforts of groups like OLPC.)You're going to have to somehow live while you watch a billion people starve (Not yet, but we might be close.)You will always need to know if the facts you've dredged up are accurate and truthful
(While Wikipedia has probably increased the general accuracy of information trawled from the internet, many don't care about accuracy, and never will. The entire Birther movement is testimony to that.)You will be forced to take on moral questions no human has ever faced
(Should I upload this video to YouTube, or not?)

Ray Kurzweil made some very interesting (and accurate) predictions for 2009, in his book The Age of Intelligent Machines. He seems to be on the right track, but just goes a little too far. While we don't have space to discuss every point here, he did predict the shrinking size of most computers (laptops, netbooks and smartphones); the increasing reliance on flash memory; wireless communications between devices; facial identification from images; video chat, and the rise of autotune.

On the other hand, he also thought a sub-$1000 petaflop computer would be available; computers would come in more shapes and sizes than we see; displays would meet print quality; tablet devices would be used in schools; most data would be entered via speech to text; walking exoskeletons would help the disabled; and that privacy would be a major political issue, rather than a personal one.